Poet Jack Gilbert, recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964, helped Centenary commence its National Poetry Month festivities with a poetry reading in Meadows Museum on Monday, April 19.  Gilbert read selections from his 1994 book The Great Fires.  The poems he read, including "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart," "Searching for Pittsburgh," and "Trying to Have Something Left Over," had recurring themes of intercultural curiosities and the nature of romantic love.

Dr. David Havird, who is an avid fan of Gilbert's poetry, introduced Gilbert as "the most elusive of poets" not only because Gilbert has spent much of his life living in various countries around the world but also because he generally publishes only one book of poetry in a decade.

Gilbert immediately plunged into the reading with two poems from The Great Fires.  After these first two poems he paused to talk about what motivates him to write poetry.

"I write to make visible the important parts of the world that we forget," said Gilbert.  He also remarked that he does not write poetry solely for entertainment.  "To me, if it's just for pleasure, it's not worth the trouble."

In addition to giving a reading, Gilbert met with Dr. Havird and interested students for a question and answer session in Jackson Hall on Monday afternoon.  Here, Gilbert spoke about his love of travel, his lengthy waits between publications, and the title of his upcoming book.

Q.  Has your travel been essential to your writing?
No.  It has given me material, but I don't travel to find something to write about.  I travel because I'm in love, or because I read something about a place that makes me want to go there.  However, the only reason I have been able to travel like this is because I haven't had a family to take care of.  I had to learn not to want security in order to be able to live in different countries.

Q.  You tend to wait 10 years in between publishing your work.  Do you refuse to let others pressure you into publishing every few years?
I like to write, but I need to live my life the way that I want to live it.  When I was 14, I made a list of everything that I wanted out of life, and I put "become famous" on it.  Then I did become famous at a fairly young age, and I realized that it's an empty thing.  Fame can be addictive, and some writers feel like they must publish in order to remain famous.  I don't do that.  I send my friends poems from time to time, but I don't publish unless I want to.  I don't need to write poetry, but I do love the art of writing it.

Q.  Your new book (which will be published in 2005 by Knopf) is entitled "Refusing Heaven."  Why did you choose this title?
We have very few pictures of heaven, but plenty of hell.  I think of heaven and think that I wouldn't want to just float around in happiness, in a place without imperfection, where you don't fall in love.  I picture everything there as being one color.  I can't imagine anything better than being here on earth and getting what you want out of life.  As for hell, I can't believe that God would want me to burn eternally.

The Conglomerate [the weekly student publication of Centenary College of Louisiana] 97.19 (23 April 2004): 3.

Jack Gilbert signing The Great Fires for Centenary student Amy Larsen

I had never met a genius before. While I am in awe of the intellectual prowess of many people I have encountered during my education, none of them are authentic, eccentric, certifiable geniuses. I am quite certain, however, that things became very different when I spent an hour listening to Jack Gilbert read his original works.

Jack Gilbert was born in Pittsburgh. He has published Views of Jeopardy, the 1962 winner of the Yale Younger Poets Series, and Monolithos ten years later. Both books were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Gilbert has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.  His latest book, The Great Fires, was published in 1994 after another elusive ten year absence. His much-anticipated fourth volume Refusing Heaven comes out next year (2005), twelve years after his latest one.

Standing at the cusp of eighty years of a lifetime, Gilbert may not strike anyone as an extraordinary man. At my encounter with him, he was dressed very simply, with a balding head of wispy white hair, and had hands that trembled when he applied his reading glasses. So deceptive was his apparent ordinariness that everyone in the room waiting patiently for him to begin seemed to fidget collectively as he tried several times unsuccessfully to pronounce the title of his first selection ("The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart"). As he began to read this first poem, I felt my heart sink just a little, only because this poem was my favorite and I had my own expectations of its interpretation, and I had gone that night hoping to hear what I wanted, if not something better, grander, and more awesome in its delicacy. But alas, as he began to read, my heart grew slightly heavier, as he trudged through the opening like my grandfather trying to decipher my six-year-old signature on a birthday card, or even the one I sent last year. (It was no use, really, but luckily he knew my name from memory.) And even more luckily, Gilbert seemed to remember his poem the more he read along. By the end of the poem I could say that, despite my apprehension, I was not disappointed, and scolded myself in my impatient youth.

Things only got better from there. As he read more poems that I had really become attached to, I realized that I was actually falling in love with the words as they came out of the author’s mouth. Instead of being at a reading, I was at an unveiling, the opening of a beautiful mind trapped in an aging body. I was just lucky enough to have the script in my hands so that no word was left forgotten. That is, of course, until the author reached down and pulled out single pieces of paper containing new works ready to be discovered and appreciated by not only myself, but everyone else present as well. I had noticed the entire audience seemed to become captivated by this stoic figure painting images that seemed vibrant and tactile enough to touch, as if they were floating in front of us all, waiting to be pointed out by our tour guide. We were travelers in a vast city seeing large buildings but not the way the light of the moon glanced off the windows of high towers. The city was our lives, and Gilbert was telling us all how to walk around in them, like small children trying shoes for the first time.

Gilbert’s poetry is like no other’s. His style is simply beautiful and specific, without being ostentatiously ornate. This succinctness of language is what enables him to paint and create such amazingly vivid images using emotions that are both universal and unique. Patricia Hempl in her 1994 review of The Great Fires calls his book one of “passions recounted over a lifetime of loves and romantic upheavals.”  And it is with these culminating passions that Gilbert looks at two of his major themes, life and death.  "Life and death are not opposites in this conception of things; they partake of each other. Together, they are the spirit... [His work] conveys a rare serenity, or a stoicism so fully achieved it passes for serenity,” Hempl remarks.  What Gilbert is trying to convey when he talks of heart breaking loss is not the triumph of defeat of a superior emotion, but rather the essence of what it means to be alive.  As Hempl states, “Mr. Gilbert's enormous relish for the physical world and his immaculate diction are about nothing less than ‘searching for a base line of the Lord.’”

In his poem "Measuring the Tyger," Gilbert writes, "I want to go back to that time after Michiko's death / when I cried every day among the trees. To the real. / To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive." As Hempl observes, “The grit of death has the taste of life.” This gives a new face to the emotion of loss, and Gilbert’s grief becomes a necessary hunger for life. Hempl makes an excellent point when she compares the emotions of Gilbert’s work to a ravenous, deeply-rooted hunger:

All the desires of a life -- especially sexual love, but also the passion for solitude, for poetry itself, for the accuracy of broken vignettes of memory -- are understood at last as a single great hunger: ‘I tried to gnaw my way into the Lord.’ In these stately yet urgent poems, ‘the Lord’ is the accumulated joys and griefs (and grievances) of a lifetime.

An important element that intrigues Gilbert’s fans is his subject matter. As he stated in a 1994 interview with Robert Stewart, his subject matter is meant to be unlike anyone else’s:

Most poetry is enjoyed because it confirms people in where they are, and what they believe, and what is beautiful, and what is pleasant... [But] I’m interested in a poetry that changes the world. Not by telling people what they know, but a poetry that puts pressure on some of the people, that can change the world.

As pointed out by his 1994 interviewer, Gilbert tends to use language sparingly. Gilbert's fragmentary syntax, for example, makes the poems more immediate. Gilbert believes it is the language that “dances the reader into a condition where one is available to the subject matter.” He also maintains that “gorgeous language often becomes rhetoric,” doing much of the emotional work that should be done by the reader. Instead of being passive, it is vital for the reader to “participate in the completion” of a poem. Once he has put the words to page, it is the reader’s job to give life and emotional personal significance to the author’s words. This act of participation pulls the reader into the world of the writer, and connects writer to reader. Gilbert prefers his language to enable communication between reader and subject. A good example of this is in the poem “Marriage” where the author’s grief is more clearly stated through brief description of his irrational behavior after his wife’s death, rather than pages of flowery elegy.

At the same time, his topics like marriage, loss, and infidelity are universal human conditions that can tie all people together. While his poetry can be described as concrete and specific, it also holds an air of mystery, leaving many things unexplained or simply unspoken. In poems like “Going There” and “Alone,” Gilbert’s simple language and stark statements leave very much to be filled in by the reader, whether the reader chooses to infer information from the poem itself, or to draw on his or her personal experiences. Gilbert justifies his abstract work by stating, “Like the greatest poetry, true romantic love is transcendental, but not mystical.”

Gilbert calls marriage “the closest thing I know to religion that isn’t religion.” Analogously perhaps, and with this theme of devotion in mind, Gilbert also calls poetry “one of the few remaining things that helps us to design ourselves and the world we’re going to live in.” Rather than being passive, his poetry takes an active role. This conscientiousness of the author in his intention to create rather than to merely describe the world adds another dimension to his work.

Gilbert serves as his own characters much of the time. In these autobiographical poems he writes unabashedly in first person, revealing thoughts and memories that are definitely not glossed over for beauty’s sake, but seem to capture pieces of his life like photographs in a frame. Gilbert takes the images in these frames and translates them to us as one would describe a painting to a blind man, with color, with noise, with shapes, with contrast between light and dark, or far and near. This amazing clarity of vision, which allows Gilbert to translate words into things that embody intense emotions, is nothing less than artistic and intellectual genius.

Kacie Lopez, the author of this essay, was in her second year at Centenary College in 2004.

Gilbert, Jack. The Great Fires. Knopf: New York, 1994.

Hampl, Patricia. “Trying to Get God’s Attention.” New York Times 15 May 1994, Late Edition, sec. 7: 26.

Stewart, Robert. “The Value of Things: An Interview with Jack Gilbert.” New Letters 60.3 (1994): 52-62.

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words Get it wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Eqyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not a language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds. from The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (Knopf, 1994) Searching For Pittsburgh The fox pushes softly, blindly through me at night,  between the liver and the stomach.  Comes to the heart  and hesitates.  Considers and then goes around it.  Trying to escape the mildness of our violent world.  Goes deeper, searching for what remains of Pittsburgh  in me.  The rusting mills sprawled gigantically  along three rivers.  The authority of them.  The gritty alleys where we played every evening were  stained pink by the inferno always surging in the sky,  as though Christ and the Father were still fashioning the Earth.  Locomotives driving through the cold rain,  lordly and bestial in their strength.  Massive water  flowing morning and night throughout a city  girded with ninety bridges.  Sumptuous-shouldered,  sleek-thighed, obstinate and majestic, unquenchable.  All grip and flood, mighty sucking and deep-rooted grace.  A city of brick and tired wood.  Ox and sovereign spirit.  Primitive Pittsburgh.  Winter month after month telling  of death.  The beauty forcing us as much as harshness.  Our spirits forged in that wilderness, our minds forged  by the heart.  Making together a consequence of America.  The fox watched me build my Pittsburgh again and again.  In Paris afternoons on Buttes-Chaumont. On Greek islands  with their fields of stone.  In beds with women, sometimes,  amid their gentleness.  Now the fox will live in our ruined  house.  My tomatoes grow ripe among weeds and the sound  of water.  In this happy place my serious heart has made. from The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (Knopf, 1994) A Brief for the Defense Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay. If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit there will be music despite everything. We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored late at night in the tiny port looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning. To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come. from Refusing Heaven (Knopf, 2005)

Jack Gilbert at Centenary's Meadows Museum